Ubuntu Accomplishments Updates

Work has been continuing on the Ubuntu Accomplishments system. Befor e I go on, I want to encourage any of you who are interested in the project and who would like to help to join our new mailing list. Click here to join; everyone is welcome!

Last week I didn’t work on the core system while some other work was going on there by Duncan, so I used my evenings to to start working on another important piece: making it easy for our documentation community to be able to contribute to the guidance included with every accomplishment. My goal is that our community can contribute without having to know how to branch a bzr branch, without needing to know how a .accomplishment file is structured, and without needing to know how to submit a merge proposal. As such, I want to have a web service in place where contributions can be made by filling in a forml I am confident that great tools can result in great contributions.

As such, with me not working on the core code-base, I used this as an opportunity to kick off this documentation piece. I knew I wanted to write this using Django due to it’s strong Python heritage, support within the Ubuntu community, and it’s simplicity. Unfortunately, I have never even touched Django before, so this was all new to me.

Fortunately, Django provides an awesome set of documentation, and Michael Hall and Chris Johnson were helpful and answered my questions.

I kicked off working on the docs portal and it now scans in all the accomplishments files from the branch and presents a list of them:

Here you can see the Ubuntu Accomplishments list of apps as well as test-local which is a set of test local accomplishments (e.g. such as a trophy for sending your first email).

When you click on each one you can then see the different fields in the .accomplishment file and edit them:

The form obviously needs some formatting love. This will come later.

The plan is that when you submit the form it will be added to a queue that shows the differences between the accomplishment file in the branch and the contribution. A project admin can then approve the contribution and it will be automatically committed to the branch. This should make documentation simple for our wider community to help with. If you are interested in helping with this, the branch is lp:~jonobacon/ubuntu-accomplishments-system/accomplishments-web-editor and have some Django experience, please join the mailing list and let me know. Thanks!

In other news, Bruno Girin and Andrea Grandi got the very first merge proposals into the Ubuntu Community accomplishments set, and Duncan McGreggor has been helping to ensure the accomplishments daemon is working as a proper daemon.

I am also pleased to see the list of reported bugs expanding so we know we can fix issues and ensure the system works reliably.